The subject matter disclosed herein relates to a vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft and, more particularly, to a VTOL aircraft with variable wing geometry.
A vertical take-off and landing aircraft (VTOL) is an aircraft that can take off, land and hover in a vertical direction and the conduct flight operations in a horizontal orientation. VTOL aircraft may be manned (i.e., piloted) or unmanned in the case of remotely piloted or autonomous aircraft and may be housed or stowed in places with limited deck and storage areas, such as naval ships.
Often, VTOL aircraft have a fixed wing configuration with the landing gear permanently affixed to the fixed tail surfaces. In these cases, the VTOL aircraft sits in its grounded condition on the landing gear so that its nose cone faces upwardly. Such an aircraft requires structures for the landing gear and structures for the outer wing panel and often requires substantial amounts of deck space that may exceed the space required to accommodate its propellers. As noted above, where the VTOL aircraft is provided on a naval ship, such deck space is frequently difficult to spare.
Moreover, since the landing gear is permanently affixed to the fixed wings and the fixed wings generally lie outboard of the VTOL aircraft's center of gravity, maintaining stability of the VTOL aircraft is difficult especially for operations on a naval ship at sea. Additional ship based equipment can enhance an aircraft's compatibly with the ship but such storage mechanisms are expensive, costly and exact a further cost to the quantity of available deck space.